Propaganda of the Name: The Meaning of 'Islamic State'.

'we believe the media, civic society and governments should refuse to legitimise these ludicrous caliphate fantasies by accepting or propagating this name. We propose that 'UnIslamic State' (UIS) could be an accurate and fair alternative name'-'Islamic State' is a slur on our faith, say leading Muslims. Observer, Saturday 13 September 2014

The complaint by British Muslim organisations and imams that the Prime Minister should stop using the words 'Islamic state' to describe the self-proclaimed Islamic State takes the absurd to new levels. For a start, Obama and Cameron have been at pains not to call it IS or ISIS or regard it as truly Islamic.

In countering the threat which is a threat to the US and Britain but not yet, it seems the threat does not even have the name is has as 'Islamic State' because President Obama, and so David Cameron, call it 'ISIL'. Cameron referred to a 'so-called Caliphate' and 'nihilists'.

It is understandable why British Muslims would not want to be associated with what they call the 'Unislamic State'. But by denying the neo-caliphate could be 'islamic' and demanding it is called the opposite of what it calls itself they run the risk of being ridiculed and giving more publicity to the idea of its being Islamic or not.

More than that, by acting childishly and petulantly by demanding the media calls Islamic State the 'Unislamic State', the Muslim organisations invite the sort of response which would delight in countering, with malicious glee, that Islamic State really is the 'real face' of Islam going back to its authentic and true 'medieval' origins.

The grotesque irony of all this is that IS would get exactly what they want in the aftermath of the first online public beheading of of a British hostage, captured aid worker David Haines, by reinforcing the attitudes of those who see that act at the hands of a British jihadist either as 'real' Islam' or as 'nothing to do with it'.

There are those who see the beheading as a warning that this is the sort of act that 'you have coming' from a British jihadist 'near you'. Then there are those denying that such an action could ever be committed by anyone professing to be Islamic, to which the answer is going to be like the panto refrain 'oh, yes it is !'.

IS knows that the beheadings are so gory and vile that the western media would whip up outrage of the sort media obsessed politicians such as Cameron thrive on when bigging up the terror threat, the better to increase their self important need to 'do' something as well as playing for votes and 'looking tough on terror'.

By talking up the 'global terror threat', IS gets precisely the necessary response. They are intelligent enough to know how useful their threat is in forcing politicians in media dominated democracies to make out the threat to be a unified one so as to better justify any military interventions they would need to take.

The reasons for that are that IS realises the western nations in Britain are bound to need to intervene militarily to protect oil and gas supplies from control or else sabotage by jihadists across the regions which is claimed as part of a new revived caliphate stretching from sub-Saharan Africa through to the Greater Middle East.

By portraying disparate jihadi-Islamist threats across these different nations as one seamless 'global threat', and using that to intervene militarily, with drones, air strikes or 'boots on the ground' IS would be able to spread its franchise operation out of its core base in Syria and into Iraq into Egypt, Libya, Yemen or Nigeria.

The ultimate ambition, of course, is to be the threat that Cameron is portraying IS as being, that is, one that reaches its sinister tentacles into the heartlands of Britain, something already played on by celebrity jihadists Anjem Choudary who are as media savvy as establishment politicians playing on fear. 

Though appearing a buffoon, Choudury is already knows how to play up to his useful media role in linking the outrage over the execution of hostages to the fact there is less outrage over the way western foreign policy means "hundreds of thousands of people have been beheaded by drones and daisy cutters".

IS online beheadings are meant to stir things up in Britain by opening up a discussion on British foreign policy why Britain is uncritically following the US as 'lapdog' and why it is condemning the execution of one British hostage claimed by ISIS to have been in the British army rather than the foreign policy for 'causing' it.

This gloating and gory propaganda of the deed which is intended by IS to be what Cameron calls 'pure evil' compared to the 'greater evil' against which ISIS is ranged: the Hypocrite Sunni Muslim regimes that made their state possible by bankrolling jihadi efforts against Assad's regime and their Infidel allies.

Islamic State is, in reality, the Islamist State of Syria and Iraq. This would be a far better designation which distinguishes between Islam and the ideologisation of Islam into a set of political tactics and doctrines adapted to the modern world which owes much in its ideas to thinkers such as Maududi and Nabhani.

Maududi used the word 'Islamic State' to mean one in which all aspects of public and private life in a perfect society would be determined by a select Godly elite who would slowly infiltrate their way into institutions and take them over from within and purge kuffars from positions of power.

Maududi put forward a non-violent path to create an utopia. Other thinkers such as Qutb, an influence on Al Qaida, stressed modernistic ideas such as a vanguard elite bent on destroying a decadent world and creating a new world through acts of apocalyptic violence and terrorism.

None of those ideas exist in the Qu'ran. Islamist ideas such as Al Qaida's at one extreme. Those groups such as Hizb-ut-Tahrir which have an ambiguous attitude towards violence demand a Caliphate as an Islamified version of the sort of utopia longed for by, for example, the Bolsheviks in Tsarist Russia.

Islamic State is no more necessarily Islamic than the the Soviet Union was a true union of republics based on the control of worker's councils or even truly socialist. However, few socialists in the west, even those who rejected the Soviet Union would have called it the 'fake union of unsocialist unfree pseudo-republics'.

Malise Ruthven puts it well when he refers to Islamism as,

'the ideologization of Islam at the political level, the construction of a political ideology using some symbols culled from the historical reperiore of Islam, to the exclusion of others. This ideology, sometimes refered to as 'Islamic fundamentalism', is better described as Islamism: the Latin suffix attached to the Arabic original more accurately expresses the relationship between the pre-existing reality ( in this case a religion ) and its translation into a political ideology, just as communism ideologizes the reality of the commune, socialism the social, and fascism the ancient symbol of Roman consular authority'.

The difference is that socialism or communism were not words with a necessary cultural resonance for those identifying with a religion and civilisation such as Islam does imply. This is why not colluding in the portrayal of Islamic State at face value is vital and why 'Islamist State' would be the right name.

One advantage, is that those following or tempted to identify with Islamist groups in Britain would see that the necessary outcome of trying to create a caliphate based on an enforced and extreme version of sharia law ends up creating a hell on earth for other Muslims first and foremost in the lands under its control.

On message politicians in Britain, however, insist on 'ISIL' for reasons of 'public diplomacy'. One reason is 'ISIL' sounds more pointedly sharp and sinister, far more deadly and dangerous than ISIS which is also the name of an Egyptian Goddess. It sounds more evil and vile like SPECTRE in James Bond.

Another handy use of ISIL, is it avoids serving to remind those who opposed air strikes against Syria in 2013 that the last 'S' in ISIS means 'Syria' which could be entered targets there bombed. ISIL sounds more like a bacteria or lethal virus, a truly 'poisonous ideology' that can seep unguarded into any 'community'.

ISIL could be borne back to 'the homeland'. Having said that, some criticised the use of ISIL because the 'L' means Levant, that is the power claim made over Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine, Iraq , Southern Turkey, or even Israel. Yet that would serve to create a greater sense threat in the region too as well as the US.

The calculation could be that nobody actually knows that 'L' means Levant or what Levant means apart from sounding a bit fragrant. Of course, ISIL and ISIS are both better than IS which means 'Islamic State' and it could not be admitted that Islamic State is either a real state or that its really Islamic which is what IS wants.

Islamic State: Britain and the Call of the New Modern Caliphate

The savagery of Islamic State is plain for all to see when broadcast across the globe via Youtube, social media sites and reportage such as that on Vice News. The gory spectacle of online decapitations, mass executions and enemy corpses strewn on pavements of Raqqa have lead the Caliphate to be called 'medieval'.

The idea IS is a medieval throwback is convenient in trying to compare it with the values of the civilised world and to portray it as irreparably 'other'. IS, from such a perspective, consists of pyschopaths looking for an excuse for gloating cruelty or else it is the real face of purest Islam just as it was back in the seventh century.

Politicians in the West such as Britain's Prime Minister Cameron, concerned at the prospect of battle hardened jihadists returning from Syria to plot terror attacks, have tended to downplay the nature of the 'so-called Caliphate'. They refuse to call is 'Islamic State' ( IS ) and President Obama refers to it merely as  'ISIL'.

By speaking of the need to 'degrade and ultimately destroy ISIL' on the 13th anniversary of Al Qaida's 9/11 attacks on New York, Obama has made it clear he refused to recognise it as an Islamic State. ISIL sounds rather more like an acronym for a deadly virus as opposed to ISIS which sounds rather less menacing.

Referring to Islamic State as ISIL makes it appear a lethal threat to the security of the region without being a legitimate Islamic State and thereby colluding with the view of itself as the direct successor to Muhammad's seventh century Arabian state; this is precisely what the self-styled Caliph al-Baghdadi would want.

However, when Britain's Nick Clegg refers to Islamic State “this medieval and vile movement” he was indicating such atrocities belong firmly in the Dark Ages. In fact, Islamic State both in ideology, tactics and propaganda belongs firmly in the modern world for a number of reasons politicians would prefer not to admit.

One reason is Islamic State is a consequence of the support and backing given to radicalised jihadists by Britain and America's Gulf allies in Qatar and Saudi Arabia. Qatar, in particular, supported the al-Nusra brigades which, among many other jihadist groups, had members splinter off and joing ISIS throughout 2013-2014

Islamic State is a classic example of 'blowback'. It was only in April 2014 when ISIS became a threat to those who had backed Sunni jihadists in a proxy war against Assad's Alawite dominated regime, Hizbollah and its Iranian backers that Turkey, Qatar's main regional ally and NATO member, put al Nusra on the terrorist list.

Two years before Islamic State became Cameron called a 'deeper and graver threat than we have ever known', British jihadists were known to be flying into Turkey to cross the border to fight against Assad. Nothing was done as it is in September 2014 to fortify the borders because jihadi travellers were fighting the right enemy.

There is a history of MI6 andi the CIA having allowed jihadists from Britiain to go to Afghanistan and to fight in Bosnia and Kosovo so that they could be monitored and later 'turned' and deployed as intelligence assets that could provide information and act as informers on domestic Islamist groups operating within Britain.

A dark and shadowy power game has gone on with British jihadi-Islamists, one exploited by groups such as CagePrisoners, a front for Islamist agitation and anti-Western propaganda which has been able to exploit the very real fact of the CIA having imprisoned thousands of western Islamists and sympathisers without charge

A jihadi-Islamist sympathiser, Moazzam Begg, founded Cageprisoners after having been incarcerated in Bagram in Afganistan following his arrest in Islamabad in 2002 . He was subequently held in Guantanamo Bay until 2005 when he was 'rendered ' as part of America and Britain's so-called 'global war on terror'.

After having played on his role as a victim of Britain's foreign policy and been courted as a cause celebre on his return by the Respect Party and the Stop the War Coalition, Begg was re-arrested in March 2014 and charged with terrorism offences in July connected to his alleged role in training at a Syrian terrorist camp.

The flavour of Cageprisoner's propaganda could be seen in one advertised event scheduled for the 20th September 2014 entitled 'Is it a Crime to Care ? Syria-Gaza, Criminalisation of Islam'. The agenda is one of building up the image of a global Muslim community persecuted the better to propagate the ideology.

By blending a defence of jihadi-Islamist ideology with humanitarian missions to the Greater Middle East, a dark mirror is held up to British foreign policy and the contradictions between its stated policy of humanitarian intervention in Afghanistan to Iraq when compared to Britain's 'support' for Israel over Gaza.

Through projecting visceral aggression on to the enemy, which is the British state and society, the propaganda narrative is one that suggests that Islamist resistance in the Middle East and in Israel is apiece with the need to resist a British state which is pursuing a global war on the Muslim umma. Hence,

'..the attacks on Islamic concepts of war, political governance and the unity of Muslim lands are nothing new, they have now increased on an unprecedented scale in the wake of the rise of ISIS and its declaration of a Caliphate. The matter is not about supporting or opposing the version of a Caliphate as demonstrated by ISIS but rather the criminalisation of Islamic political thought and ideology.

The concepts of jihad, shariah and khilafah are not the exclusive possession of ISIS but core Islamic doctrines subscribed to by almost one third of the world's population. It is telling that the government's treatment of ISIS is similar to its treatment of Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hizb-ut Tahrir, and the Taliban, despite the enormous differences of belief and methodology between the groups.'

Islamism is not Islam and there are, of course, various trends within Islamism : ISIS is at the violent and bloody end of this political spectrum. But British Islamists, such as Jamal Harwood, head of Hizb-ut-Tahrir and Anas Altikriti of the MAB, hold to the idea that revolutionary Islamism is the one true political Islam.



The grim irony is that many British Islamist movements, front organisations and propaganda outfits such as the British Muslim Initiative are backed and bankrolled by Britain's foremost Middle Eastern ally in the Syrian conflict and commercial trading partner in the form of its Gulf partner Qatar.

The MAB is essentially an British version of the Muslim Brotherhood which Qatar and NATO member Turkey backed against Iran and Hizbollah with the full support of Britain, the US and France through such groups as the Friends of Syria created in 2012 by Nicolas Sarkozy, the then French President.

Qatar was prepared to back the most ruthless Sunni militants and jihadists in Syria and the most stalwart defender of Qatar has been the the British government. In April 2014, Philip Hammond was in Doha when he announced locating a British military base in the gas rich emirate and arms deals worth QR230.

The Muslim Brotherhood, of course, is a relatively 'moderate' Sunni militant group backed by Qatar in Egypt and in Syria. This is one reason Britain and the US was prepared to work with it and  identify with Qatar's regional strategy to back it until the Egyptian coup in 2013 and the emergence of Islamic State in Syria.

It is within this context that David Cameron in March 2014 ordered an enquiry into whether the Muslim Brotherhood should be branded a terrorist organisation. The reason, given that the group had been effectively given cautious backing in 2012, was the fear of Britain being caught up in any blowback from Egypt.

Despite the idea that the 9/11 Al Qaida attacks on New York 'changed everything', Britain continued being a haven for Islamist malcontents or 'Londonistan' and no terrorist charges were ever brought against those who had been advocating it such as Abu Hamza, who was extradited to the US, Omar Bakri and Abu Qatada.

London remains in 2014 a place where Islamist exiles from the Muslim Brotherhood are allowed to settle and act as influential lobbyists with a media apparatus supported by Qatar because of the scale of billions of pounds worth of gas wealth being invested in the Stock Market, prime real estate and buying influence.

Any decision to put the Muslim Brotherhood on the terrorist list would be a purely political decision based on realpolitik considerations and the need to please Britain's other regional allies such as Saudi Arabia and , of course, Israel which has its own influential lobby groups and detests Qatar for backing Hamas in Gaza.

It is in response to that threat that Anas Altikriti is ramping up the messianic propaganda offensive against the British State for being complicit in the oppression of Muslims both within Syria and Gaza and being "Islamophobic" in its attempt to criminalise legitimate Muslim aspirations for a Islamist political order.

In such circumstances, there is a danger of ever greater "radicalisation" within Britain as the Islamist emphasis upon the Caliphate, jihad and the imposition of sharia law, portrayed by Cageprisoners as "not the exclusive property of ISIS", could catch on as potent symbols of Muslim unity against 'western imperialism'.

After all, a prime component of IS propaganda is to provoke the west and grab media attention. Beheading journalists is a tactic to draw attention so that fellow jihadi travellers in the Middle East and the Britain can exploit the outrage to suggest these killings are only in revenge for the 'greater slaughter' of Western policies.

Such propaganda has been the consistent line from those ranged against the British government and prepared to rationalise terrorism to a point just short of justifying it ever since 9/11 when the 'war on terror' was first launched and groups such as the grotesquely named Stop the War Coalition were set up.

Though the StWC was created by disgruntled far leftist agitators indulging in toy town revolutionary politics as well as political has-beens from the 1980s dismayed by the collapse of British Communism and the Soviet Union in 1991, it rapidly became dominated by Islamist fronts such as the MAB.

What united the British hard left and Islamists was common opposition to the British state, the perceived global dominance of American Imperialism and the ideology which presented it and Israel as the two main determining reasons why the Greater Middle East was embroiled in conflict and wars.

As a consequence to this supposed 'anti-war' activism in Britain, Prime Minister Tony Blair and hack propagandists such as Denis MacShane started to step up the the rhetoric about Britain and 'the west' being menaced by an alignment of dictators such as Iraq's Saddam Hussein and Islamist terrorists.

Blair's manner of 'framing his response' to events in the Greater Middle East in the run up to the disastrous invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003 ended up giving credence to the idea popular among opponents of the war that the US and Britain were engaged in a long 'civilisational war' with Islamism at home and abroad.

Of course, Saddam Hussein was a secular dictator whose overthrow led to chaos. The installing of a democracy by 2005 only widened and deepened Iraq's pre-existing sectarian tensions and led to an open warfare that had not abated by 2014 when ISIS stormed in from Syria and led a Sunni Arab insurgency.

What Blair's government did was to confirm the propaganda narrative of jihadi-Islamists that Britain's foreign policy was about destabilising and dividing and ruling oil rich lands for the exclusive benefit of its corporations and decadent western consumers whose repellent materialistic lifestyles were part of the problem.

The ideology of Hizb-ut-Tahrir and other Islamists identifying with a transnational Islamic State was that the false decadent existence of the westerner was inauthentic. The hypocrite Blair embodied this state and society which exploited Muslim disunity just in order to grab what was really Muslim people's oil.

Propaganda such as this had long found a receptive audience in the Middle East. That it found support in Britain was not surprising as it was the case bit forward by radical leftists who saw the Iraq War as an invasion to seize control of Iraq's oil and, in truth, that was an important reason behind it.

Radical Islamist and their leftist allies in the Stop the War Coalition were able to frame the 'war on terror' narrative in Britain as a 'war of terror' in which the victims were Muslims irrespective of Blair's proclaimed belief that the invasion of Iraq was a war of liberation from a dictator who murdered Muslims.

The irony is that both radical Islamists and pro-liberation radicals in Britain agreed that Saddam Hussein was an evil dictator: they were only at odds because Islamists regarded the western imperialists as the 'root cause' in creating the dictatorship and backing it in the first place whereas Blair saw it as an outgrowth of pure evil.

Blair saw Baathist dictatorships and Islamism as a consequence of a evil totalitarian ideology while Islamists saw Saddam Hussein wholly as a CIA backed stooge who had done the West's bidding in containing Iran and was kept in power after the First Gulf War of 1991 to protect other tyrannies such as Saudi Arabia.

The stated purpose of Blair's 'ethical foreign policy' in using British forces to protect civilians from brutal regimes by assisting in removing them. It was to make a break with previous Cold war realpolitik and the policies that had led to the ethnic cleansing of Bosnian Muslims in the 1990s by paramilitary Serb militias.

Contrary to improving Britain's standing in the so-called 'Muslim World', Blair's decision to join in with the US in Iraq was portrayed in 'anti-war' propaganda as a war on Muslims for oil just as nothing had been done to save Bosnian Muslims because there was no oil in the former Yugoslavia at stake.

The War in Afghanistan in 2001, which was less than two years old when Iraq was invaded, was more difficult to portray as a cynical war for resources using a humanitarian pretext, though the interest the US government and UNOCAL had in building a gas pipeline was often mentioned as the 'real reason'.

It was the Iraq War that overshadowed the way Britain and its relationship with Muslims and political Islam was portrayed. Blair was adamant that Islamism was a the global threat after the fall of the Soviet Union just as global communism had been after 1945 when Britain and the US had defeated fascism in Europe.

The irony, once more, is that this messianic depiction of Islamism, called after the London Bombings of 2005 by the neoconservative politician, Michael Gove as 'seamless totalitarian movement ( Celsius 7/7 page 12 ), was one groups such as Hizb-ut-Tahrir and the MAB agreed with, except for Islamism meant 'liberation'.

Though Islamism was not one monolithic ideology uniting fanatics in power or else sleepercells waiting to be activated across the west, what happened in the decade after the Iraq invasion raised the stakes in that either the Arab nations would move towards democracy or stay under dictators said to be imposed by the west.

The daughter of the Tunisian Muslim Brotherhood movement Soumaya Ghannoushi, one of the many offspring of political exiles from Arab nationalist dictators who had been allowed to seek refuge in Britain, was a founder of the British Muslim Initiative designed to mobilise British Muslims as a political force.

Ghannoushi made it plain that is Britain and other Western nations did not stop their support for Arab dictators and Israel, then the threat of terrorism coming back to visit the West was going to be a regrettable consequence that they would have coming to them in the form of blowback.

Ghannoushi was considerably more sophisticated is presenting British leaders such as Tony Blair with a choice: either continuing to back corrupt secular dictators and rentier elites in the Maghreb and Near East and face an aggressive fanatical response or else back democratic Islamist reformers.

Ghannoushi, who benefitted from a wealthy background and private education, was a regular orator at anti-war movements in London in the first decade of the new century who had a fondness for incendiary rhetoric and yoking together the predicament of all Arab Muslims in different lands into one suffering umma.

 'In our globalised world, crises can no longer be kept far away, left to rage in distant lands and devour obscure nations. The troubles of Kabul, Jenin and Falluja now spill over on to our shores, towns and cities, lay bare our fundamental vulnerability, and put an end to our sense of immunity....London and Washington must decide which Islam they want: a peaceful, democratic Islam, crucial to any pursuit of global stability, or the anarchical and destructive Islam of al-Qaida and its ilk'.

Ghannoushi's stance was clear: the most ferocious and violent jihadist movements were wholly a reaction to colonialism and western imperialism, a form of resistance that was the outgrowth not of any real or imagined shorcomings within Islam as a 'religion of peace' but a pathological response to oppression.

What Ghannoushi was revealing was a veiled threat on behalf of the British umma whereby if Britain sided or was seen to be siding with regimes that oppressed the democratic aspiration of Arabs, through aligning with Islamist movements that were not aligned with Al Qaida, then they would become terrorist targets.

Ghannoushi's was power claim, a judgement of what 'ought' to happen concealed within a discourse that masqueraded as a mere statement of the facts. Clearly it had little time for minorities that were non-Islamic in the Middle East by conflating Arabs with Muslims and the quest for an Islamic dominated state.

Democratic Islamists such as Ghannoushi rejected Al Qaida and Hizb-ut-Tahrir. Yet they retained the idea that Islam's lack of any clear distinction between the realm of the political and of the religious contained the true liberatory potential that those with the correct view of Islam would apply if free from western meddling

One problem with the vision of Islamism as the source of true freedom and diversity-within-unity is that in practice is would always cause chaos and have a ready excuse in the context of Arabic politics that the failure to realise democracy was less to do with the flaws in the doctrines but western policy.

By 2011 with the revolt against Ben Ali in Tunisia was replicated in Egypt. Arab uprisings across the region had created new hopes of a democratic order but within two years by 2013 the result had been chaos and either the restoration of authoritarian regimes or the collase into conflict, violence and terrorism.

The only exception to this bleak scenario was Tunisia where the Rachid Ghannoushi's Ennada Party won an election in October 2011, a result that was accepted and created a regional partner the western states were prepared to work with. Needless to say, firebrand daughter Soumaya Ghannouchi has been quiet ever since.

Elsewhere in the Maghreb and Near East the prophecy of an end to secular nationalist dictatorships and its replacement either by reformist Islamised democracies or else Sunni militancy, jihadi insurrections and blowback has actually happened as a consequence of events in Libya, Egypt, Syria and Iraq.

The collapse of the old order of nationalist dictatorships after 2011 came without western interference, laying bare the futility of the decision to invade Iraq a decade before. It came too late as the effects of years of corruption, mismanagement and struggles over resources as oil and water caused intractable conflicts.

Blair continued to stand by his idea that Middle Eastern dictators and Islamist terrorism were both part and parcel of the same disorder, except where those dictators were amenable to western interests. That proved evident when as a UN special "peace" envoy he praised Sisi's crushing of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood.

Though Blair seemed alone in being the most vociferous western public figure lauding the use of military force to overthrow an elected but shaky government in Cairo, machine gun demonstrators, ban opposition parties, and pass the death sentence of its leaders, Britain ended up giving de facto recognition to Sisi's regime.

With the disintegration of the borders drawn up between Syria and Iraq by Britain and France in 1916, the Sykes-Picot 'line in the sand', the collapse and disintegration of Libya following the western backed overthrow of Gaddafi and the rise of jihadi-Islamists there, the stage was clearly set for the new Caliphate.

In northern Syria, the failure of all political systems since the Turkish government abolished the Caliphate in 1924 after three years of war against Assad had failed to remove him and the brutality of war has laid waste to vast parts of the country, made the new Caliphate the only political 'solution'

In Iraq, the Sunni Arabs had been marginalised and pushed out of Iraqi national life by the dominance of Iranian backed Shi'ites in Baghdad and the growing autonomy of the Kurdish region: both regions where Sunni Arabs were not diminant had the vast majority of Iraq's oil wealth.

Within Britain, the call of the IS Caliphate has been confined to a few who went to fight against Assad but numbers also of jihadi-travellers who sympathise with it even if they have not wanted to join in as combatants They serve in other capacities as making good jihadi wives or executioners of journalists such as James Foley.

The response to these atrocities and British born jihadists by Cameron repeated similar mistakes of the sort made by Tony Blair. Having done nothing to stop the jihadists going to Syria when they were fighting on the 'right side' against Assad, Islamists are pointing now towards their criminalisation as a double standard.

Cameron started to use similar language as Blair about a 'generational struggle' with ISIS when Britain and the US had supported Saudi and Qatari policy throughout 2012 and 2013 and did little or nothing to put pressure on Riyadh or Doha to stop the flow of funding jihadists in Syria.

The phrase 'generational struggle' was in any case deployed by Cameron during the Algerian hostage crisis of January 2013 as a means by which disparate threats against western resource interests such as Algeria's oil and gas could be welded together as a united threat to Britain's way of life and security.

The reason for these rhetoric sleights of hand and precision tooled media soundbites is to provide the impression that there is a one global movement of jihadists that stretch from otherwise exotic far off Muslim lands directly right into the heart of Britain with the same intention of causing terror and mayhem.

This rhetoric is useful as 'public diplomacy' because it softens up the public mood for military intervention when it is needed. It also serves to conceal the facts that those violent jihadi-Islamist threats have emerged and surged out of the blowback created by the support given to such jihadist forces by Britain's allies.

Terrorism expert Michael Clarke claimed, 'The danger of the prime minister's rhetoric.. is that it can serve to unite forces that might otherwise be fractious and ineffective. The most obvious strategic mistake would be to unite forces which will otherwise become more disparate in the natural course of events."

However, the dangers in that were factored in to the 'business as usual' approach that Britain has taken towards jihadi-terrorists as useful as assets when fighting against forces such as Assad's which stand in the way of its geopolitical ambitions and its oil and gas interests in the Middle East.

Jihadi-Islamists in Syria and Iraq no less than powers such as the US and Britain are playing the long game in vying for control over resources. In calling itself 'Islamic State', the new caliphate has attempted a propaganda coup which aims to unite jihadists across Africa and the Middle East against 'western imperialism'.

The rationale is to trap Western politicians within their own rhetoric about a 'unified threat' and drawing them into war with any one jihadi-Islamist group where oil and gas or strategic interests are at stake: from Boko Haram in Nigeria, al Shabaab in Somalia, AQAP in Yemen and jihadi-Islamists in Libya and Sinai in Egypt.

So would appear that IS could spread as a 'franchise' operation and global brand throughout these lands.With East Ukraine in conflict and the Libyan capital haven fallen to jihadi-Islamists, the EU powers are far more than the US, with its shale oil and gas, increasingly concerned for energy security at all costs.

In Britain's case, it is Qatar that is courted as the long term supplier need to step in and up the export level of liquified natural gas to Britain as North Sea gas depletes It is also Qatar which is responsible for backing not only Muslim Brotherhood forces in the Middle East but also militias in Libya and also the Taliban.

While Qatar did not directly fund or back Islamic State it is a direct consequence of its rivalry with Saudi Arabia in trying to back the jihadists most effective in advancing their interests and to install its government in Damascus. Saudi Arabia backed factions opposed to the Muslim Brotherhood which it now calls 'terrorists'.

The danger is that such regional rivalries among those Gulf state powers which are allied with Britain could be fought as proxy wars just as they are at present in Libya between Qatar which backs militant Islamists and the UAE, Egypt and Saudi Arabia that are all backing forces previously loyal to Colonel Gaddafi.

Across many of the lands to which a stake has been claimed by the new Caliphate of Raqqa, whole parts of states have collapsed in part or completely where a combination of climate change, drought and overpopulation has put pressure upon society and  thrown up jihadist movements against corrupt regimes.

Within Britain, the British Muslim Initiative and the Cordoba Foundation are promoting a vision of the Muslim World that Britain ought to be bound to uphold, that of the Muslim Brotherhood, unless it would want to be condemned to being an oppressor of the Muslim umma as seen in the recent Gaza-Israel War.

The danger is where the British State is portrayed as not having upheld the interests of Muslims, it is held to be hostile and putting itself in the camp of the enemies of the Muslim Brotherhood abroad and so of the freedom of Muslims everywhere including within Britain.

So when Cameron made a speech playing up the 'ISIL' as 'a greater and deeper threat to our security than we have known before' he reacted in precisely the way IS would have wanted by conflating Islamic States threat in the Middle East with as yet unrealised and abstract threat within Britain.

The publicly made avowal of 'depriving people of their citizenship' and prosecuting people for terrorist activity abroad taps in to the idea promoted by groups like Hizb-ut Tahrir and Cageprisoners that British Muslims everywhere are second class citizens and so the 'extremism' the government condemns feeds on.

By converting the entire regions where British jihadists could head into one seamless global battleground, the British government is acting in a manner more likely to make that become a reality by doing little to have put pressure on Saudi Arabia or Qatar to stop backing 'extremists' only to change when blowback beckons.

Those British jihadists who went abroad were not stopped by the British security services in 2011. Nor were plans made then to work with Turkish security because it was policy back then to funnel jihadists towards fighting Assad. Jihadi sympathisers are aware of those double standards and ready for revenge attacks.

The irony of jihadi-Islamists invoking Western foreign policy as a justification for terror attacks is as absurd as the botched and shoddy realpolitik strategy of that foreign policy in having facilitated the very rise of the Islamic State to which they would owe allegiance over that of a Britain to which they feel no primary loyalty.

That there are those who feel the call of loyalty to a caliphate in Britain has long been apparent, even if not quite the one being created by al-Baghdadi in Syria and Iraq. But that the British government would effectively play a part in creating one through the consequences its own policy strategies is a black farce.

Why the Caliphate could be Established in the Middle East.

'The declaration by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of this new entity, that he is the supreme authority of a new "caliphate" makes it easy to portray the Islamic State as a reactionary throwback. But this is an error. Baghdadi's vision is profoundly contemporary.

It is also a radical break with the strategic vision of previous militant leaders. Political Islamists such as the Muslim Brotherhood and their offshoots have long talked of appropriating institutions and power, by a variety of means ranging from peaceful social activism to a violent coup d'etat, but never about creating a new state.

What Baghdadi has done is fuse the political Islamists' aim of seizing state power with the neo-traditionalists' more global vision to create a recognisable if rough-edged state that is simultaneously supposed to be a launchpad for greater expansion. This unprecedented combination is a powerful one' The Isis leader's vision of the state is a profoundly contemporary one, Jason Burke, The Observer, August 24 2014.

Jason Burke is the most able of all those writing on Al Qaida and ISIS. The new Caliphate is dynamic and modern, a combination of Al Qaida's emphasis on the purifying potential of spectacular violence to remake and reimagine the world and the 'charitable' state functions of the Taliban of Afghanistan.

The difference between Afghanistan in the 1990s and the new Caliphate in northern Syria and Iraq is the way IS has captured major oil installations and selling oil to gain up to $1m a day in revenues. As such it can put the wealth towards benefitting alienated Sunni Arabs in both Syria and Iraq.

The other long term factor favouring an expansionist warlike Caliphate, apart from the supply of money from shadowy Gulf donors and men identifying with jihadism from around the globe, is climate change. Put bluntly and bleakly, the Fertile Crescent which long sustained life in the region is dying.

One reason for the outbreak of the Syrian conflict in 2011 was a combination of higher food and fuel prices and several failed harvests which affected the Sunni Muslim communities the worst. With the collapse of state authority and the chaos created by war, the most ruthless jihadists of IS could flourish.

Assad tried to use control over water as a means to quell Sunni unrest. IS is copying that tactic in trying to control the Mosul Dam in Iraq. The 2003 invasion made an appalling system that was collapsing in Iraq even worse than it was and, combined with drought and crop failure, exacerbated Sunni militancy.

An article in Slate Magazine made plain the longer term factors destabilising both Syria and Iraq,

'The United Nations lists Iraq as “one of the Arab region’s most vulnerable countries to climate change.” In 2004, just after the American-led regime change, a Congressional Research Service report cited “rapid population growth coupled with limited arable land” and “a general stagnation of agricultural productivity” after decades of conflict and mismanagement during the final Saddam years as the main reasons Iraq grew more reliant on imports of food amid international sanctions and the oil-for-food program. A major drought from 1999-2001 also hampered the country’s ability to feed itself. Since then, conflict has raged and the climate has grown even more extreme, with alternating severe droughts and heavy rainstorms'.

The River Euphrates and the Tigris are drying up. Overpopulation relative to resources, and large numbers of unemployed young males, necessarily means the temptation towards violent jihad of IS as a means towards salvation and survival against the rival claims to diminishing water, land and, of course, oil.

IS is an expansionist Caliphate by nature or it is going to be nothing. With the shadowy proxy wars between the regional powers going on, IS could be useful to those wanting to check Iranian ambitions so long as it does not threaten to much to break out and menace Saudi Arabia.

With the Kurdish region, with its better organised government oil and water from the mountains headed towards independence, the battle for Baghdad would intensify and go on for coming decades ahead in a new epoch of semi-permanent chaos and technological barbarism.

The Call of the Caliphate in Britain: Why British Jihadists Fight in Syria.

The rise of IS in Syria and Iraq and the evident barbarity it revels in, from social media depictions of  enemies being machine gunned into open death pits, the beheading American journalists and threatening to exterminate or convert Christians and killing Yazidis, has caused some to be 'bewildered'.

Yvonne Ridley certainly claims to be 'baffled'. When asked about ISIS, Respect Party member and Islamist propaganda hack opined, as if knowing her exact stance was going to be a matter of pressing public importance in Britain,

'There are many reasons why I've not spoken out against ISIS. For a start, I'm not sure who it is, where it came from or how it is funded. I've not seen such a militarily- and strategically-savvy fighting force emerge in the Middle East before, other than the highly disciplined and much feared Hezbollah. I, like many others, want to know a little bit more about ISIS before making public comments'

So Ridley wasted hundreds of words 'taking her stance' and switching the topic to Israel half way through when IS has nothing to do with Israel. For someone who, like George Galloway, is a champion of Hizbollah it's odd that she so clearly wants President Assad removed when Hizbollah is a staunch ally of Assad.

The laughable thing about Ridley is that Galloway, the Respect MP for Bradford West, is actually a strong backer of Assad against the Sunni jihadists ranged against him, mostly because of the idea that the US created ISIS by supporting Sunni militant fighters against the Alawite Shia dynasty Assad belongs to.

Ridley cannot resist a conspiracy theory though. One of the most popular is that ISIS is part of a devious plot by the US and Israel to 'destabilise' Iraq ( as if it was not unstable enough without the US intervening once more in Iraq ), part of a CIA/ Mossad scheme to divide and rule Iraq against Iran.

Ridley has an alternatibe plot scenario 'The former head of the British Army says that the West should sit down and negotiate with Assad to get rid of ISIS, but what if ISIS was created by Assad and his ally Iran, which has members of the elite Republican Guard in parts of Syria?'

'As crazy as it sounds, that would explain why Nouri Al-Maliki's Iraqi army fell away so easily in the face of ISIS leaving behind a massive arsenal of weapons for the militia to use. It is virtually inconceivable for a trained fighting force to leave all of its kit behind before doing a runner, just as it's virtually inconceivable that a crack fighting force like ISIS could emerge from a rag tag bunch of ill-disciplined rebel fighters buoyed-up by disaffected youngsters from Europe and beyond'.

It sounds insane because it is insane and has no basis in reality. However, if the task is to try to rationalise away the depth and extent to which the Islamic State is a direct reflection of a strand of Islamist thinking and practice, then it is clear that Ridley would want to pretend ISIS has no basis in the world view she holds.

Mona Siddiqui, a professor of Islamic studies and public understanding at the University of Glasgow, writes on British jihadists in Syria that 'we in the west feel bewildered by their ferocity and brutality' and then goes on to write, a very uneasy way, the following,

'In the UK, the fear that Isis have attracted hundreds of British men to fight in the region has reignited the question of integration and radicalisation among younger British Muslims. But perhaps what is more chilling this time is the way many of these men, who have gone over to fight, have unflinchingly assumed the role of thug and tyrant given the first opportunity....Their narrative may well be wrapped up in the familiar language of jihad and "fighting in the cause of Allah", but it amounts to little more than destruction of anything and anyone who doesn't agree with them'.

This is obfuscation again. The barbarism of British jihadists comes from the ideology and is reinforced by the barbarism of war. This experience leads them towards enacting a  greater depravity that was within them as a consequence of the ideology that firstly allowed them to rationalise the impulse towards killing and death.

The fact 'John the Jihadist' beheaded the American journalist is hardly surprising: it is meant to be shocking but it's not if the purpose of the murder is understood, that there is a 'method to the madness' and that it lies within the need to use a maximum of terror to instill submission or awe in the enemy.

The demonstration of ISIS savagery is meant to show that this is a form of revenge for the war that the US and the West started against the Muslim World, to make plain that these sorts of killings are an inevitable consequence of Western foreign policy just as much as Lee Rigby's murder in London was.

So Siddiqui has ignored the deep emotional appeal of ISIS's ideology to obfuscate the role of Islamist discourse within Britain, a form of 'political religion' that indeed does pit a "purified" and purifying version of Islam against both the West and its legacy through secular leaders and the West's allies in the region.

The irony is that IS has gained ground because of its finance came from private donors in Kuwait, Qatar and Saudi Arabia as part of a quest to defeat the Shia Alawite Syrian leader Assad. Now they make money from illegal oil sales and robbing banks. It's a combination of gangsterism and deranged ideology.

But the West and anything associated with it in the Middle East are thus Infidels ( e.g the Christians being subjected or slaughtered ) and or else Hypocrites and both are targets for the foot soldiers of IS. This appeals to young British Islamists who regard the West as the root cause of all global problems.

To a certain extent, this idea is propagated by non-Islamist organisations that eschew the complexity of world politics and reduce complicated problems down to the idea the West is the Big Evil , the demonic 'system' that needs to be fought against until its power is destroyed.

The so called 'anti-war' movement in the form of the Stop the War Coalition is actually a front for revolutionary activists who would regard IS as wholly a product and reaction to Western Imperialism: whether Al Qaida operatives or IS foot soldiers all are denied an agency of their own.

It is this denial of moral responsibility that enables radicalised militant Islamists to regard themselves romantically as dark avenging angels, committed to kill not because they have bloodlust but because the sheer iniquity of the Western dominated world order evil made them do it.

There's a need to face facts. IS reflects a 'retrograde discourse' within Islam as regards the Caliphate, an idea that acts as a sort of ideological utopia for alienated Sunni Muslims and that in Syria and Iraq has gained ground because of the weakness of state authority in the northern parts of both lands.

ISIS has realised a Caliphate that has transcended the boundaries created by the France and Britain back in 1916. The reason semi-educated Islamists without ego security went to Syria to fight is because it offers a strength of purpose and certainty, freedom from the meaningless freedom of the West.

In the large cities and conurbations of Western Europe, there is no formative experience and no experience of membership beyond consumerism and the identification with consumer branded goods. With a mediocre education system, Islamists gain knowledge and membership from radical groups.

'Islam is the solution' is a regular placard slogan: the Caliphate is a standard part of Islamist discourse. The appeal of this is similar to those of the secular utopias of communism in the 1960s, whether Castro's Cuba or some Trotskyist alternative to the disappointing reality of 'actually existing socialism'.

The new Caliphate has the appeal of the communist utopia promised by the Russian Revolution of 1917. The paradise was postponed only by the hideous plots to destabilise it by the Western imperialists. So too the Caliphate was abolished after the Ottoman Empire collapsed and the Arab lands partitioned.

The Caliphate is posited as a mythological entity that would unite all Sunni Muslims once more and its rise is seen as the death knell for secularism, Godlessness and the Western imperialism that brought it all about. Fighting in Syria or within the belly of the beast are apiece with the same jihad.

The nihilism of those supposedly educated at British universities and going to fight in Syria has not seen them transform from naive idealists into brutalised psychopaths by the war alone. It was inherent within the ideology that posits the Caliphate as a realisable Utopia here on earth and that demands blood must be shed.

The Islamic State: Climate Change, Terror and the Making of a Caliphate.

The Caliphate ( Islamic State ), established and centred on Raqqa in Syria, does clearly have its origins on uneducated mosque imams contantly extolling the Caliphate as a symbol of a lost spritual and political realm towards which Sunni Muslims should aspire and realise through jihad.

Syrian writer Hassan Hassan cites the Syrian cleric Mohammed Habash claiming "Isis did not arrive from Mars; it is a natural product of our retrograde discourse." and while that is true, the sad reality is that it has caught on because of a civilisational crisis in this part of the Middle East that has induced it.

One thing that comes across from Vice News's report 'Spread of the Caliphate' is that the foot soldiers of IS are both brutal and banal, largely semi-educated men all the more dangerous for the indoctrinated certitude with which they assert their credo that they are on a roll and shall follow God until victory is assured.

The ISIS jihadists are in for the long game, indoctrinating and grooming the children to become future warriors as the only way for the Caliphate to survive and strive forth towards its destiny of creating some sort of pure community that is uncontaminated by enemy influences from without and within.

If they were not so deadly, their corny attempts at piety would be entirely laughable as opposed to merely contemptible. Hence the point of their headless corpses strewn across pavements and sticking heads on spikes is meant to give the impression that they are, in fact, very serious.

The aim is to spread the Caliphate out, kill or convert the Infidel ( or with Christians make them pay a tax ) and to be part of God's project as it unfolds and is realised. Women are to be nowhere seen on the streets of Raqqa. Jihadists previously living in Europe claimed they left the girls behind for the cause.

Women need to be properly concealed in order to thereby maintain the fundamental purity of the Caliphate from within, the better to make it more ferocious and formidable without against Indidels and Hypocrites ( secular Arabs). It says so, they claim, in the Qu'ran.

This myth of the return of the Caliphate is one held on to by the simple minded but it could only spread in the conditions of lawless chaos of the sort that existed in Afghanistan in the 1990s. ISIS is similar to both the Taliban and Al Qaida but this time rolled into one-and with control over lots of oil resources.

IS is selling crude oil on the international black market, something even reported to be reducing oil prices. It is making $1 million a day from the sale and the rush of adrenalin from that and the prospect of using revenues to expand their Caliphate is causing millennial style fervour.

The support among Sunni Arabs for this is based on a revolt of those living in lands where crop failure, desertification, drought and having been pushed out of ant prospect of adequate poliitical representation in either Syria or Iraq has led to the Caliphate as a "solution" to all earthly evils.

The Sunni Arab zone in northern Syria and Iraq is trapped between other regions with far more resources both as regards the vast majority of the oil wealth ( which lie in the Kurdish regions to the east ) and those absolutely vital to life such as water. Iraq is a resource war over oil and water.

The River Euphrates drying up as a consequence of climate change, decreasing precipitation and increasingly hot summers. Turkey was alleged to have reduced supplies along the Euphrates upstream. That makes the necessity to spread the war as far as possible even more 'vital'.

So many Sunni Arabs in Iraq have come to believe nothing to lose by aligning with a pyschopathological group that asserts their interests as against the Kurds, Turks, and Shi'ites. IS attempted to take the Mosul dam so as to have control over electricity and water: this is a resource war.

The cause of jihad is precisely what they have to sustain them both materially and in hope of regaining the dominance Sunni Muslims once had in the region more generally and in Iraq, in particular, under Saddam Hussein who used to use control over the water supply as a tool of control over the Shi'ite south.

Evidently, IS pursues policies that are evil and mad but there is, beyond evident sadistic cruelty and pleasure in murdering Infidels and Hypocrites, a method and motive to the madness and mayhem and the clear intention to instil terror and utter fear. They need to be taken seriously.

If Iraq and Syria were to break up, it is difficult to see how there could be a secure and viable state for Sunni Arabs as that would depend on the wars in both states having any prospect of ending. And so IS is taking the destiny of Sunni Muslims into its own hands, destroying the Sykes-Picot borders of 1916.

ISIS is an outgrowth of failed attempts to back Sunni forces by the Saudis as a check on Iranian influence in Syria, the idea of Sunni persecution and yet historical superiority, myths of the Caliphate and the collapse of Syrian and Iraqi Sunni regions especially through climate change and war.